Off With The Kites!

This is post is part of the Close-Up Blogathon run by Matt Zoller Seitz at The House Next Door.

Colin Clive, aureoled by a huge, glowing vacuum tube, calls for the kites to be released, and the raising of The Bride begins.

I had not planned on doing another Close-Up post, but stepping through Bride of Frankenstein’s creation sequence this week, I was transfixed by the gorgeous images.

Director James Whale made the best of a rare chance to revisit and improve upon the creation scene from the original picture. The lab has been upgraded, the crackling super-science machinery multiplied and augmented with extra gizmos. Broom handle switches are thrown with a deafening bang, a flash of magnesium and a shower of sparks. Go look: Shahn over at Six Martinis and the Seventh Art has posted screencaps showing some of the white-hot flares and the washed out, ghostly afterimages that punctuate the action.

The genius of the sequence is its busy, vertiginous montage, quick-cutting between weird angle shots of the intense scientists, their frenetic topside helpers, the forbidding mechanical devices, and the slab rushing upwards to meet the lightning, all of it backed by a musical soundtrack that pulsates like a heartbeat. The Bride’s creation sequence, edited by Whale and Ted Kent, would merit as close and careful an analysis as, say, the shower scene in Psycho.

I have isolated a handful of shots, all close-ups of the principals in the creation scene…

In a brief, unsettling moment, shadows transform half of Clive’s face into a death’s head skull.

Ernest Thesiger, rattled by electrical detonations, registers fear.

Stark lighting transforms Clive and Thesiger’s faces into grotesque masks, eyes punched out.

Skull clamps glistening in the torchlight, the impatient Monster (Boris Karloff) cranes to see his promised Bride cradled high overhead, waiting for the lightning to blast her to life.

Thesiger’s Pretorius, momentarily robbed of his frigid, pompous composure, creeps out in grimacing rapture as The Bride comes alive.

My other Close-Up Blogathon posts:

The Monster is introduced Into The Light.

The Short, Apocalyptic Life of The Bride of Frankenstein.

The Short, Apocalyptic Life of The Bride of Frankenstein

This is my second contribution to the Close-up Blogathon run by Matt Zoller Seitz at The House Next Door.

In terms of technique, James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) is sometimes crude. Its canvas night skies droop; a microphone throws a shadow across the scene at the dungeon door where Frankenstein and Waldman prepare to ambush The Monster. Four years later, Whale traded the original’s raw, claustrophobic expressionism for lavish Hollywood Golden Age glamour.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is awash is pearly grays and deep focus photography. The sets have grown cavernous and meticulously detailed. Heroic music punctuates every scene. Colin Clive is at his manic-depressive best and he gets to interact with the formidable Ernest Thesiger as the most eccentric, eldritch mad scientist of them all. The Monster has lost his malevolent gauntness. He speaks, cultivates a taste for wine and cigars, sheds tears, and pines for a friend.

Into this heady mix is introduced The Bride, only to signal a quick, catastrophic end to this macabre fairy tale.

The story goes that iconic actresses like Brigitte Helm and Louise Brooks were considered for the role. In the end, it fell, magnificently, to Elsa Lanchester, who also played Mary Shelley in the film’s prologue, connecting Mary and The Bride. The comparison is made clear and unmistakable: In the opening sequence, a delicate Mary reaches for her beloved Percy, turning her back to the obnoxious Lord Byron, a balletic move directly echoed when the frightened Bride reaches for Henry Frankenstein, turning away from the lugubrious Dr. Pretorius.

The entire lifespan of the Monster’s betrothed, from the moment we see her fingers move until The Monster pulls the Deus Ex Power Switch that blows everything to atoms, is almost exactly 12 minutes. Add a few moments, unshown, while Frankenstein and Pretorius remove the head bandages and slip her into a tent-like shroud. I’d like to think that The Bride’s electrostatic hairdo sprang up on its own as soon as the bandages unraveled. Otherwise, the entire, short existence of the thunderstruck Bride is chronicled on screen, most of it in tight, loving close-up.

The Bride’s profile was inspired by a bust of Nefertiti, which is appropriate for a Monster Queen. She is unforgettable, with her electrified hair, bee stung lips, lightning bolt scars and big eyes, irises the size of dimes, that never seem to blink.

Halloween may be just around the corner, but I’m skipping ahead to Valentine’s Day. Here’s my homage to The Bride, as she appeared in close-up, from the shot of her bandaged head with its crown of safety pins to her final, defiant hiss.

I give you The Beautiful Monster: The Bride of Frankenstein.

Directed by James Whale. Makeup by Jack Pierce. Cinematography by John Mescall.

My first contribution to the Close-Up Blogathon, about James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), is here.

Into The Light

This post is part of the Close-up Blogathon under the auspices of Matt Zoller Seitz at The House Next Door.

The first significant close-up in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) is that of the Monster’s hand. For all the energy, the sparking fireworks and thunderous cacophony of the spectacular creation scene, the one sign that life has been kindled in the artificial man is the slow movement of the gruesome hand, with its darkened fingertips and an ugly scar carving the wrist. It’s alive.

The classic “bolt head” Frankenstein is an icon of the 20^th Century. Today, the image so permeates popular culture that it is almost impossible to imagine its power when it was first flashed on cinema screens 76 years ago. One scene, in its terrible beauty, still evokes how disconcerting, how utterly alien the first sight of this incredible face must have been, and that is in The Reveal.

The Monster is announced with a groan and the sound of shuffling feet. Waiting in the lab, quiet now, its equipment stowed under dust covers, doctors Frankenstein and Waldman hurriedly turn down the lights. Down, not up. The Creature will be brought out in luminous penumbra.

The door opens and the Monster stands, confused, with it’s back to us.

Next, in close-up, the inexplicably square head slowly rotates. We glimpse, progressively, an overhanging brow, a tall forehead. Stitches, skull clamps and neck plugs. Turning, the face’s cubistic angles catches the low light, now faces us, and The Monster is revealed.

Then, in complete, breathless silence, a sort of staccato zoom-in: Two successively closer shots with the camera curiously unmoored, trembling slighty, as if hand-held. We are given a Good Look and The Monster stares back at us, too close, with his dull dead man’s eyes.

Boris Karloff’s brilliant pantomime would make his Monster unforgettable, but never again would the character appear so mysterious, so utterly primal as here, in its introduction, when that impossible face came into the light and was seared into the collective consciousness.

Directed by James Whale. Makeup by Jack Pierce. Cinematography by Arthur Edeson.

Part Two: The Short, Apocalyptic Life of The Bride of Frankenstein, is here.

Frankensteinian : The Walking Dead

Made in 1936, Michael Curtiz’ The Walking Dead mashes a Frankenstein theme — with Boris Karloff along to sell it — and a gritty Warner Brothers’ hardboiled crime story.

Karloff is framed for murder and gets the chair. Scientist Edmund Gwenn, using among other things a real “Lindbergh Heart Pump”, resurrects the wrongfully executed man, exclaiming “He’s alive!” when Karloff stirs.

No heavy makeup needed here: Karloff wears a shock of electrified white hair and that unmistakable, heavy-lidded, deadpan stare that always says “back from the grave”.

This walking dead man doesn’t actually kill anyone. Just showing up scares the bad guys into fatal accidents, like backing out of a high window. In a unique twist, this character is not a zombie bent on revenge as much as an avenging angel who’s mere appearance serves divine justice.

In a rare, early case of film novelization, The Walking Dead was adapted to fiction by John L. Chambliss in the July 1936 issue of the pulp Movie Action Magazine.

There’s a good review of the film at 100misspenthours.com.

The scrumptious poster is from the collection of Jean-Claude Michel.

Dueling Frankensteins

“In deconstructing one of the most popular story of all time, we hope to offer a new perspective for contemporary audiences.”

- Mark Baron and Jeffrey Jackson, authors, Frankenstein, A New Musical.

There’s an embarrassment of riches for Frankenstein fans in the New York area. The serious-minded Frankenstein, A New Musical opened Off-Broadway at 37 Arts last night (October 10), while the light-hearted (light-headed?) Mel Brook’s New Musical, Young Frankenstein begins its preview run tonight, October 11, at the Hilton Theater.

The two productions are a just few blocks from each other, but worlds apart in concept. If there’s any competition here, it’s sibling rivalry: Hunter Foster plays a thoughtful Victor Frankenstein in the Off-Broadway musical while his sister, Sutton Foster, plays the loony Inga in the Mel Brook’s romp on 42nd Street.

Frankenstein, A New Musical promises to be “extraordinarily faithful to Mary Shelley's original novel while offering a bold, new experience for modern theater audiences”. The company’s website has been updated with photos, cast and crew bios and music samples. Playbill has just come out with a very informative article about the show.

Listen to Frankenstein

The days of radio drama are long gone, but the art form survives through the efforts and considerable talent of people like actor/writer/producer Craig Wichman, founder of New York’s Quicksilver Radio Theater. Online streaming, podcasting and audio books are new avenues of creativity that this unique troupe of seasoned actors and technicians is actively exploring. Quicksilver has produced a wide variety of award-winning audio plays tackling everything from Shakespeare to Sherlock Holmes.

The script for Frankenstein: Modern Prometheus is an intelligent and very faithful 60-minute adaptation of what is, admittedly, a huge, sprawling book. Under the direction of Jay Stern, Joseph Franchini as Victor Frankenstein and Craig Wichman as The Monster headline a large cast whose fine work —complete with sound effects and an original score — makes Mary Shelley’s novel spring to robust life.

This Frankenstein has already earned deserved kudos from critic Leonard Maltin and Frankenstein expert Don Glut. Now it's your turn to experience it: Treat yourself to Quicksilver Radio Theater’s Frankenstein, streaming online this Thursday, October 11, at 1pm EST on Greater Portland Community Radio. Go to http://www.wmpg.org/ and click “Listen” on the menu at the top of the page. Part 2 will be streaming next week, on October 18.

The graphic illustrating this post is by yours truly. Thanks, Craig, for letting me cut loose!

Clive Barker's Frankenstein

“The thing I thought could be new, that I thought I could add new to the story, was about a man who begins to divide himself in the same way as a country divides itself… I like the idea of mutinous body parts, of a body coming apart at the seams."

- Clive Barker

An early play by Clive Barker, Frankenstein in Love, or The Life of Death, is a wild mix of political allegory and weird romance set in a fictional Latin American country. Dr. Frankenstein is a state-supported torturer experimenting on the downtrodden citizens, and his Monster, El Loco The Bogeyman, is a rebel leader. A doomed love triangle is established when both men fall in love with the ever-morphing Veronique, Frankenstein’s ultimate creation.

The play was first staged in 1982 by The Dog Company, a London fringe theater group co-founded by actor Doug Bradley (pictured here playing Dr. Frankenstein, with John Elnaugh). Barker and Bradley, fellow Liverpudlians, would reunite in 1986, when Bradley was cast as the horror icon, Pinhead, the Head Cenobite in Barker’s film Hellraiser (1987).

Experimental, horrific and perverse, Frankenstein in Love was done in the Grand Guignol style of staged graphic horror. In a 1986 Fangoria interview, Barker said, “The 'Grand Guignol' tradition fascinates me. The idea that there was this theatre in Paris where you went just to watch people mutilated and dismembered onstage strikes me as fun. I thought I'd try my hand at a piece of shock theatre.” A highlight of the play comes halfway through the proceedings when Frankenstein flays El Loco alive, hanging the gory, gruesome, empty skin like a flag on the rafters.

Reviews of the play often criticize its length and talkiness, but its jet-black humor, its provocative tone and, no doubt, Barker’s now famous name, has seen the play through several revivals. Barker’s generosity is also a factor: When he first released collections of his plays in book form (Frankenstein in Love appears in Incarnations), he offered the rights for just $1 and invited theater companies, amateur or professional, to mount his plays, just to get them seen.

The image at top is from a 2006 version directed by Gavin Yap in Kuala Lumpur.

The graphic at left is from a 2002 version by Sensurround Stagings in Atlanta, Georgia. The poster at right is from the 2001 version by the Rude Guerilla Theater Company of Santa Ana, California.

Read about a 1996 version directed by Russell Blackwood for San Francisco’s Thrillpeddlers here and here, with production photos here.

Read a review of a 2004 version produced at the Vortex Theater in Albuquerque.

The Clive Baker Resource site is here, and the play Frankenstein in Love is discussed here and here. A bibliography of the Incarnations collection is here.

And here’s a short BBC profile of Clive Barker, Barker's Wiki page, and an elaborate fan site.

Related Post: Frankenstein in Love

Frankenstein in Love

Doomed lovers: Daniel Lujan as El Loco, Frankenstein’s Monster as a revolutionary leader, and Andrea Osborn, the demon-morphing Bride in Clive Barker’s gory agitprop play Frankenstein in Love or, The Life of Death, as staged by the Sacred Fools Theater Company of Los Angeles, in 2003.

More on Clive Barker's Frankenstein here.

The Posters of Frankenstein

A unique, expressionistic poster for the Swedish release of the 1931 Frankenstein, from the collection of Jean-Claude Michel.

Michel, as he loves to note, was born in Brittany, just like Colin Clive, Universal’s original Dr. Frankenstein. He fell in love with monster movies upon seeing Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein when he was 12. He began writing about horror films in 1957 and served as European correspondent for Famous Monsters of Filmland and Cinefantastique. He was a co-founder of L’écran fantastique magazine and the Paris Fantasy and Science Fiction Film Festival, where he would meet such genre luminaries as Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, Paul Naschy, Christopher Lee, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and “Coffin Joe” José Mojica Marins.

Michel is pictured here, demonstrating his Frankenstein credentials, as he appeared at the launch of L’écran fantastique, in Paris, 1969. The magazine would evolve from a fanzine to a successful and highly influential periodical that is still going strong today, almost 40 years on.

I am happy — and honored — to report that Mr. Michel, with his typical generosity, will be sharing his wonderful collection of Frankenstein posters and advertising material with us.

Merci, Jean-Claude!

Frankenstein, Executioner of Evil

“My Frankenstein is a nightmare executioner of evil, caught up in freakish tales of Martian slavery and poisoned nature.”

- Grant Morrison

The Seven Soldiers of Victory is a DC Comics superhero team with ever-changing membership. In its last incarnation, starting in 2006, writer Grant Morrison inserted his own revisionist Frankenstein into a massively complex, multi-character, crossover series comprising seven different titles and art by a who’s who of artists. Overall, the megaseries dealt with time, space, alien plague and threats of global devastation, and was meant to shake up the very fabric of the DC Universe (for the umpteenth time).

Here’s a synopsis of the Seven Soldiers' Frankenstein story arc on Wiki, and a mind-bogglingly detailed overview on the Wiki-like Barbelith. Here’s a review of the entire Seven Soldiers saga.

Morrison’s Frankenstein wears the tattered Hussar’s uniform of his Napoleonic era origins, He carries an antique “steamgun” and an Archangel’s mystical sword. The powerful art for the 4-issue Frankenstein story arc is by Doug Mahnke. In issue #3, a sexy and very deadly Bride is introduced, with recognizable electric hair and, er, four arms.

The Seven Soldiers of Victory series is collected in four graphic novels, with the Frankenstein stories appearing in volumes 3 and 4.

See a portfolio of Doug Mahnke superhero art.

"Love letters to our darker angels"

Growing up, did you love monsters? Did you read monster mags and monster comics? Build monster kits, collect monster gum cards? Did you swear by Boris and Bela, Lon, Vincent, Peter and Chris? Bava and Fulci and Romero? Did you love Halloween, plastic fangs, fake blood, rubber masks? Did you think vampires, werewolves, aliens, robots and, of course, the Frankenstein Monster, were just the coolest?

That makes you a Monster Kid.

Richard Harland Smith, a staff writer for Video Watchdog, is also a contributor to TCM’s Movie Morlocks Blog. He has written a piece that reflects on a Monster Kid’s life, his own, which all Monster Kids will recognize as theirs. It is an ode to Monster Kids that goes straight to the heart, and manages to do it without an ounce of schmaltz, which is no mean feat. It’s just plain, good writing. Damn good.

Read The MonsterKids are all right.

Frankenstein Wraps

ON THIS DAY, October 3^rd, in 1931, James Whale did some pickup scenes in around the laboratory set and said “Cut!” for the last time on Frankenstein. The film had shot for 35 days at a final cost of $291,129.13.

The film was edited and a first preview held in Santa Barbara on October 29. By all accounts, the audience was shocked and Universal understood they had a powerful, unnerving and potentially problematic film on their hands.

Cuts were made. The infamous drowning sequence was chopped in half. Brief moments thought too violent were trimmed: Close-ups of the hunchback assistant taunting The Monster with a torch, a struggle and a hard blow to The Monster’s head, and a shot of an hypodermic needle jabbed into The Monster’s back. A line of dialog where Colin Clive exclaims, “Now I know what it feels like to BE God!” was buried under the sound of thunder.

New scenes were ordered, bookending the film. An introductory sequence was filmed with actor Edward Van Sloan stepping out from behind a curtain and delivering a “friendly warning”. Frankenstein, we are told, “sought to create a man after his own image, without reckoning upon God”, as if the film was meant as a lesson in divine morality.

Van Sloan cautions the audience that the film might thrill, shock or even horrify, and invites the nervously disposed to leave. The scene was obviously meant to head off critics, censor boards and religious groups who might — and did — take issue with the film. It also serves as good old hype, like parking an ambulance in front of a theater and planting nurses in the lobby.

A new closing scene was tacked on after the original ending, a shot of the burning windmill. Clive’s Henry Frankenstein, meant to be killed in his fall, was given a reprieve. James Whale shot a happily-ever-after epilogue featuring Frederick Kerr toasting his son’s survival, and the Frankenstein lineage. Colin Clive and Mae Clarke are replaced with stand-ins, far from the camera. Henry Frankenstein is bedridden, head turned away.

After the film wrapped, on this day, 76 years ago, James Whale moved on to film the largely forgotten Impatient Maiden, with Mae Clarke. Colin Clive quickly returned to London, leaving Hollywood on the 27th. Boris Karloff went back to being a character actor. He had to buy a ticket to see Frankenstein in a movie house. In the opening credits, his name was replaced with a gimmick interrogation point.

No doubt, everyone involved hoped Frankenstein would do good business, maybe as good as Dracula, the Bela Lugosi film released earlier that year. Nobody, then, could have known that they had just created what would become the most famous horror movie of all times.

Frankenstein Memorabilia

Straight From The Son

He was the four-year old son of the Son of Frankenstein (1939). He is the last surviving actor to have played opposite Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster. Donnie Dunagan, now 73 years old, has put his personal collection of memorabilia up for auction. These unique and important items include photos, contracts, letters, pay stubs, scrapbook pages, and a wonderful autographed still of Boris Karloff signed “with love from the giant”.

The auction goes live on October 6.

Info via Tim Lucas' Video WatchBlog. Essential reading!

Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein Mask

Also on the Heritage Auction site: Monster masks used as props in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).

A vulcanized rubber Frankenstein stunt head, a perfect likeness of Glenn Strange, appears surprisingly well preserved for its age and one suspects it might be a more recent “pull” from the original mold. Nevertheless, it is a stunning piece.

Frankenstein Exhibit

Right in time for Halloween, here’s an exhibit of classic stills from the great Universal Frankensteins. Rutgers Student Center in New Brunswick, New Jersey will be displaying Frankenstein Pictures: A Photographic Tribute to Boris Karloff and The Frankenstein Monster from the collection of Ron MacCloskey, October 14 to the 27th.

Check the Creepy Classics website for all the details.

(Thanks to Stuart Gardner for the info!)

Franken Monkey

These cute Frankenstein tryclops with lolling tongues are hot designer collectables beautifully sculpted by Roberto Jhageri for Atomic Monkey Ltd.

There are two models, each offered in a variety of colors. The stiff-arm walking Franken Monkey is a 3-inch resin figure, and the one with the spiral tail is a 6-inch vinyl figure with a pop-off snorkel skullcap and a removable glow-in-the-dark brain!

Atomic’s Franken Monkey family will soon expand to include Count Mockula, Igor, and a 6-inch vinyl Mummy Monkey with removable limbs.

Collectors note: Runs are strictly limited and selling out quickly. Check the Atomic Monkey site for availability. Sold out models can sometimes be found with resellers like Rotofugi and Panik’s Toy Box.

Here’s a review of the Franken Monkey on Plastic & Plush.

(Thanks, Bibi!)